Freedom at Midnight

In early 1947, Britain was exhausted by World War II, its economy crippled, its people enduring severe rationing. Yet the British Empire still spanned a quarter of the globe, and its most prized possession, India, remained under British control. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre chronicle the dramatic final months of British rule, from the appointment of Lord Louis Mountbatten as the last Viceroy, Britain's crown representative and colonial ruler in India, through the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948.

Prime Minister Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour government committed to Indian independence, summoned Mountbatten, a decorated naval officer related to most of Europe's royal houses, to preside over Britain's departure from India. Mountbatten resisted but agreed on two conditions: a fixed public deadline for withdrawal, and full authority to act without interference from London. He arrived in New Delhi in March 1947 to find communal violence between India's 300 million Hindus and 100 million Moslems escalating toward civil war.

The authors trace the deep roots of Hindu-Moslem antagonism: the religious divide between polytheistic Hinduism and monotheistic Islam, and the economic disparities that left Hindus dominant in commerce while Moslems remained largely peasants. The idea of Pakistan, a separate Moslem nation, was first articulated in 1933 by Rahmat Ali, a graduate student at Cambridge. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, once a champion of Hindu-Moslem unity, became the unyielding advocate of partition after the Indian National Congress, the main nationalist party, refused to share electoral spoils with Jinnah's Moslem League, the political party representing Indian Muslims, in 1937. The Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946, when 6,000 people died during "Direct Action Day," a Moslem League mass protest that erupted into bloodshed, brought the subcontinent to the brink of civil war.

Meanwhile, the 77-year-old Gandhi walked barefoot through the violence-ravaged villages of Noakhali in eastern Bengal, trying to restore peace. The authors trace his transformation from a shy law student in London into a master of non-violent resistance, shaped by racial humiliation in South Africa. His campaigns against British rule had made him the most famous Indian alive, yet as independence approached, his dream of a united India was slipping away.

Mountbatten launched what the authors call "Operation Seduction," breaking with viceregal tradition by visiting Indian homes and inviting Indians to the formerly all-British viceregal table. He conducted private negotiations with four leaders. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Cambridge-educated Prime Minister of the interim government and Gandhi's political heir, became a key negotiating partner. Vallabhbhai Patel, the tough Congress boss, was won over after Mountbatten threatened to resign. Gandhi proposed a radical alternative: Hand all of India to Jinnah to govern rather than divide it. When Gandhi failed to persuade his own Congress colleagues, the gulf between the aging leader and his political followers began to widen.

Jinnah proved immovable across six meetings. The authors reveal a closely guarded secret: Jinnah's doctor had discovered in 1946 that Jinnah had advanced tuberculosis and perhaps two years to live. Jinnah refused to slow down, knowing that if his enemies learned he was dying, they would simply wait him out. Mountbatten never learned this, which he later said could have changed the course of history.

By early May, Mountbatten concluded partition was unavoidable. When he showed his London-approved plan to Nehru, Nehru was horrified: Its provisions could fragment India into a dozen pieces. V.P. Menon, a self-made Indian civil servant who had risen from construction worker to the Viceroy's senior staff, redrafted the plan in six hours, offering provinces only the choice of India or Pakistan. Mountbatten secured approval from Attlee and won the reluctant backing of Winston Churchill, the former prime minister and Conservative opposition leader, by promising India would remain in the Commonwealth.

On June 3, 1947, the Indian leaders formally accepted partition. At a press conference the next day, Mountbatten spontaneously announced August 15 as the date for the transfer of power. The most complex divorce in history followed, as two bureaucrats divided everything from railway cars to library books. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never visited India, was given weeks to draw boundary lines affecting 88 million people. Mountbatten labored to persuade India's 565 maharajas, hereditary rulers of a third of the subcontinent, to join one of the new dominions.

Gandhi, unwilling to celebrate, went to Calcutta as Mountbatten's "one man boundary force," living in a crumbling house with Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Moslem politician responsible for the 1946 killings. Their alliance produced a miracle: The city remained peaceful. At the stroke of midnight between August 14 and 15, Nehru addressed the Constituent Assembly, India's lawmaking body: "At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." Gandhi slept through the moment.

Independence Day brought jubilant celebrations, but the Punjab was already burning. Communal massacres had been escalating for weeks, and Radcliffe's delayed boundary award deepened the chaos. For six terrible weeks, Hindus, Sikhs, and Moslems turned on each other. Ten and a half million people fled their homes in the largest migration in human history. Trains arrived at stations carrying corpses. When violence engulfed Delhi in September, Nehru and Patel asked Mountbatten to run the country. He agreed, establishing an Emergency Committee that temporarily restored English authority over India.

In October, Pathan tribesmen from Pakistan's northwest frontier invaded Kashmir, whose Hindu maharaja had refused to join either dominion. Mountbatten insisted India could not send troops unless the Maharaja formally acceded, and secured Nehru's agreement that accession would be confirmed by a popular vote. The plebiscite was never held, and Kashmir became a source of enduring conflict between the two nations.

Gandhi arrived in Delhi and threw himself into the refugee crisis. On January 13, 1948, he began a fast unto death, demanding communal peace and the payment of 550 million rupees owed to Pakistan. His body deteriorated rapidly, but his suffering forced the government to relent. After 121 hours without food, he broke his fast. The demand for Pakistan's rupees catalyzed murderous hatred among Hindu extremists. Nathuram Godse, a journalist from Poona and fanatical follower of Veer Savarkar, the leader of militant Hinduism, resolved to kill Gandhi. A first attempt on January 20 failed when co-conspirators lost their nerve. Despite capturing one conspirator, the police failed to transmit critical identifying information to Delhi.

On January 30, 1948, Godse stepped from the crowd at Gandhi's evening prayer meeting, bowed, and fired three shots into his chest. Gandhi whispered "Hé Ram," meaning "O God," and died. Mountbatten rushed to the scene and, when someone shouted the assassin was a Moslem, declared that the killer was a Hindu, a claim he later admitted was a guess intended to prevent a massacre of Moslems.

Gandhi's murder achieved what his last months of life could not: It ended the communal killing. Godse and co-conspirator Narayan Apte were hanged in November 1949. Jinnah died of tuberculosis in September 1948, barely thirteen months after Pakistan's birth. Nehru served as Prime Minister until his death in 1964. Mountbatten returned to naval service and was killed by a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1979. On February 28, 1948, as the last British soldiers passed under the Gateway of India in Bombay, thousands of Indians spontaneously sang Auld Lang Syne, a farewell to the era that had ended and a tribute to the man whose non-violent revolution had begun a new one.